What the Japanese Know

Someone told me that in Japan there are gardens, little sanctuaries dedicated to lost babies. I want to find one. I like the idea of a place where Magnolias bloom in late winter casting shadows over magnificently raked gravel, where water pools and moss softens the edges of white stone. I like to picture delicate plum blossoms, a symbol for courage to the Japanese, fondly testing the morning air, bravely offering their petals year after year to the new season.

For women like me, there are no such gardens that I know of.  No place to visit the memory of an almost-person, a baby that is more cloud-shape than human, to whisper to a never-born child, sing to it, look for it.

Portland winters are sometimes grey as a tarpauline, the city covered over by cloud; we live in a house of mist for months. This is hard for me, and harder still this year. After Christmas, when my family left for their homes in southern Oregon, Der and I left too. Someone had suggested we go to Hawaii to escape sadness of losing a baby, many even offered to help us "get away." But there were financial matters to think of; there was work to be done. So we took our memory of the baby into the field of gray. We drove through the still, ashen-colored buildings of Portland, the rain-sodden trees, out past St. John's bridge, the Linton Feed store, Sauvie Island, farther and farther until the landscape was unknown to me, until the damp world slid by in a monochrome wash.

Our destination was Astoria, and the Cannery Hotel. We spent three days looking at the bridges, watching the tide shudder and swell, the birds become indistinct from the waves and then burst forth flying. On the last day we drove over a bridge spanning the wide Columbia. The sky was rubbed charcoal, with flirtations of blue streaking through. We drove out to Cape Disappointment, the false end to the journey of the Lewis and Clarke expedition, and did not even discuss the irony of the name.

We reached the terrifying mouth of the river and the dark stones that protect the slim shore from its massive force.  We climbed out of our car and over the cold basalt slabs, stood on the slick boulders that compose the levy and were made mute by the pounding waves and the raking wind. Our jackets flapped and billowed; my eyes teared. Bits of rain needled my face. My hair tore around my head reckless and electric.  The water sucked and roiled with such great, thundering force that I could feel the raging pulse of it rising up in the dark slots of my bones.  I could hear the rocks as if they were moving or echoing or rolling.  It was a sound the color of basalt, an impassive gray, a simple mineral cry.

We stood there for no more than five minutes looking at the wild, thrashing water. Our instinct to retreat was too strong. Without a word, we climbed, slipping, back over the dark, hulking boulders, crossed the dun-colored sand threaded with sedges, back to the safety of our car. It was no Japanese garden, but it was something--the shuddering pulse of the harsh, cold mouth of the Columbia, the battered landscape twisting and shoveling unthinkable tons of water, not thoughtful, just massive heaving and thundering with a terrifying, awful momentum. It gripped me, that force, challenged my specialness, delivered me to myself.

In the car, blood started to return to my face and hands, to my ears. The blueing sky dilated and showed through briefly.  The trees stood still, unmoved, cantankerous and grey, protected from the wind and waves by the height of the levy. Der kissed my hand with his cold lips and we left without ceremony.

The Memory of a Peach

Think of peaches
Think of nectarines.
Winter's bare branches are a stiff denial, but fruit--
think of that dream color,
a happy detour
into the possible, how now
the summer seems improbable
and geese
are always heading North.
Buildings in the city ruminate
and decay while
the memory
of summer haunts and tempts,
toys with the imagination
like a dream.

Boats in Water

The longer I live, the more alive I feel, partly because of what is gained, but mostly because of what is lost. Every time I lose something, a new layer of the human experience is revealed to me, a new layer if myself. I've learned that nothing is tidy and I've come to think of life as a sweet and awful mess, a gorgeous, horrifying mess, in which survival means, at the very least, endurance, at most, epiphany, maybe revelation, perhaps even beauty.

I don't know whether children are born with joy, pure and unbroken, then are set to sea, and if life is a series of storms that batter each human boat until it forgets its native shore, loses all sense of direction and must set course for some entirely new destination, or if we are lost to begin with and encounter myriad opportunities to restore our commitment, to refine our internal compass, to see ourselves made and remade by events that my either capsize us or bring us, in the end, safely home.

At 35-years-old I find, to my shock and amusement, that I am fine. It's strange to accept the simple fact that a single, unalterable loss does not capsize me.

Pen Pals

"My pen pal asked me how far along you are."

Micheal scribbles on a sheet of paper at the dining room table. His thick hair obscures his eyes but I can see his lips pressed into a thin line, concentrating.
"Was that hard?" I ask him.
He shrugs and shakes his head, no.
"Her mom is 14 weeks."
The space between us elongates. I look at him as if down a corridor as it stretches into a tunnel and warps.
I don't say anything for a moment.
"I think we'll try again," I say to him, to myself, to the space between us.
"Like when? You'd better do it soon. Don't ladies stop being able to have babies when they're like 50?"
"Maybe tomorrow. Maybe we'll start trying tomorrow."
He looks at me then, rests his pen, smiles finally.
"That'd be good. Almost everyone I know has a brother or a sister."

What God Wants

God doesn't want you to kill babies and neither does your 10-year-old step-son. That's what he tells you when you are headed west on Lombard street, in the sleeting rain, in the steady gray, in the impenetrable monochrome of a Portland winter.
        I am in the middle of a sentence when he says this. I am suddenly stuck on repeat. I try and begin my sentence over and over again and all I hear is, "Kate, stop killing babies." My husband glances over from the driver's seat. My step-son begins humming.
        I remember saying things at ten like "Dad, you don't have a singing voice," just because I knew that he felt vulnerable about it. I wasn't trying to be mean, I just saw a soft spot and pushed to see what would happen. I remember feeling excitement mixed with dread and regret.  I remember not meaning it, just watching to see what would happen. Would he cry? Would I get in trouble?
        When I hear this, I don't immediately say anything to Micheal. I give my husband a slight nod to indicate that I am fine, but my eyes well up with tears. "Kate, stop killing babies," I hear it again in my mind.
       Micheal is dealing with my miscarriage in his own way.  Maybe he's angry with me.  He was on his way to being an older brother when I lost the baby. When we told him about the pregnancy, he had spent weeks singing and dancing.  He had been effervescent. We were becoming a family on a new level, and everything between the three of us felt different. It was made all the more special for Micheal because the baby's due date was the same day as his birthday.  In his mind they were twinned.
       Realizing where we are, I remember the billboard we have so often passed so I say, "Oh, did you see that billboard? The one that says, 'Stop killing babies"--God'?" For a brief, unmistakable moment, I hate the Christians ferociously.  We'd passed the billboard many times and even commented on it, Micheal and I talking about what it meant and why it would be posted for the public to see.
       "Yes," he replies, and then says it again, "Kate, stop killing babies, God." Maybe he laughs a little.
       I nod,"Mhmmm...., that's a funny billboard, huh?"
       It's hard not to leap to my own defense, about how I loved that child and didn't have a choice. But I don't. This is Micheal's moment, a moment in which he is articulating some sense of loss, his loss. To overshadow it with more explanation of the love we had for the baby, for the inevitable and irreparable moment in which we lost her is not the point, so I remain quiet.
      My tears are quiet too. They keep coming. I look out the window.  The Satin Sugar silo, solid and white, is glowing eerily in the gray light. The railroad cars are standing in sendentary queue, cold and remote.
       We each sit quietly for a while, making our separate ways through this.

Fever 103

I, too, am a Mollusk

like you,

ship-shape and hard,

twisted in liquid sheets,

damp and turning
in slow,
dark, revolutions

Spine to the outside

gripping mitts

and a

forgotten tail.

We, two, identical,

dreaming in blood-rhythm,

in a phlegm house,

Little squire

Little purpose

Little squatter

In your crimson

World float,

Turn the wheel

of that

Hard dream.

I, to the sea

You, to the land.

Me, pushing off

You, sinking in.

We are a love-

knot,

intertidal,

two old species,

fossils pressed

into slick

stone
geologic crush and melt

shoving off 

toward the
soft
promise

of Matter

Letter to a Lost Child

You, tiny perfect puncher,

Little softness

Riding around

My ribs middle

Lowing to my insides

Keening and flexing.

I remember you

Soft as you were

Like a love note to my life

Little wonder

Bright day

Sudden star

So short

Your insistent

Pedaling toward

Me

And mine to you

Through the

Curtain of flesh and fluid.

Never doubt I wanted you.

Knew you somehow

As if out of a dream.

A cloudshape I couldn’t

Quite catch, or see.

Until there was nothing left

But burning between

My legs, those strobing lights

And the surgeon’s congealed

Clicking.